The OS-periment

This post can be considered a follow-up to my previous post on file management. It goes into more details towards describing what I have in mind as far as filesystem organization and everyday file and software management is concerned. If you are interested in what happens the first time software is run or where temporary [...]

So, around December, I mentioned that I was busy working on a smaller-scale Qt project. As it turns out, it is now ready for public distribution, and so I can introduce you to my latest baby, Hashish. The way the Internet works forces us to create accounts on websites all the time. Ideally, from a [...]

So far, I have described the various kernel components in a picture in which they are roughly independent, only quickly mentioning what depends on what. In reality, of course, the situation is more complex, and dependencies determine in which order kernel components shall be started. This post aims at determining said order. Raw data about [...]

As mentioned in the last post of this series, two notions are ill-defined in the process abstraction design that has been presented so far. One is that of process properties, and the other is that of live updating. After giving the subject some thoughts, it appeared to me that those notions are important and have [...]

And so this series nears its end ! In this article, I will be discussing how the interface to memory management component components will be re-done to better follow the usability conventions of the rest of the kernel, and what this redesign entails from an implementation point of view. Also, may I take the opportunity [...]

Welcome to one of the last parts of this “process abstraction” series. In this article, we will consider the various insulators which control communication with external hardware through interrupts, I/O ports, and memory-mapped registers. Interrupt ... [More] manager (class name : InterruptManager, instance name : interrupt_manager) This kernel component manages interrupt sources that are directly connected to [...] [Less]

I hate today’s mass storage devices, and you should hate them too. They are slow, short-lived, and ridiculously fragile. It just sadly happens that we have to cope with the disappointing state of the art in this realm for long-term data storage. But is there a way we could design operating systems and applications to [...]

So, in this OS, we have decided to let the kernel manage the CPU and its RAM and to leave the rest to user-mode drivers. From the point of view of OS development, these two pieces of hardware spread in a range of hardware resources : RAM chunks and their virtual address translations, privileged CPU [...]

(If anyone can give me photographic credits for the background image, please do so ! I found it in a web search, but no credits were given and the name at the bottomleft corner is too small for me to read…) So, the OS|periment is celebrating its second birthday today, and like the last time [...]

Merry Christmas and happy new year in advance everyone ! Last week, finding one more experimental proof of the insufficiently well-known fact that six years old children and their grandmas are not representative of mankind as a whole led me to think about the target audience of that OS. Who do I code this OS [...]